Landed cost margin leakage

Landed cost margin leakage is where tariff recovery work should start.

Before a company asks whether tariff cost can be recovered, it needs to know whether landed cost is leaking through margin records in a way finance can measure and operations can trace.

What margin leakage means for an importer.

Landed cost margin leakage happens when duties, tariffs, freight, brokerage, fees, or allocation logic move through inventory and COGS without a clean product-level explanation. The company may feel the problem as weaker gross margin, unexplained SKU profitability, or a product line that looks less profitable after tariff changes.

The first step is not a refund claim. The first step is separating tariff and duty cost from the rest of landed cost, then testing whether the affected entries can be tied to products, shipments, customers, exports, replacements, rejected goods, or other downstream records.

The fast screen.

A practical screen reviews broker entry data, duty and tariff fields, landed-cost postings, inventory receipts, COGS treatment, SKU or item keys, invoice records, and downstream activity. If those records connect, leadership can decide whether specialist review is worth the next step. If they do not connect, the business has a record cleanup project before it has a recovery file.

Signals that the page is worth a deeper look.

Tariff or duty spend is material enough to affect gross margin.
Finance can identify where duty cost lands in inventory or COGS.
Operations can provide SKU, invoice, shipment, lot, serial, or BOM-level keys.
Import records and downstream records can be compared without guessing.
Leadership wants a stop/go view before paying for claim-facing review.

Boundary.

Trade Recovery Data provides a data-readiness screen only. It does not provide legal advice, customs brokerage, HTS classification, claim preparation, claim filing, eligibility opinions, or refund guarantees.

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